The film "The Thief Family" not only aroused enthusiastic responses, but also aroused heated discussions. Some viewers view this movie with the greatest "maliciousness" and the greatest "goodwill", and I think this is all deviating from the director's original intention.
Before entering the film industry, it was Hirokazu Koreeda who worked in TV stations for many years and made a number of TV documentaries. The shooting experience of these documentaries has become a rich soil for his future fictional film creation. In his autobiographical essay "Things I Was Thinking When Filming", he sorted out the experience accumulated in the documentary work and wrote: "The filming of a documentary is not "reproduction", but how to face "generation". "He applies this experience to the creation of fictional films, especially in this latest work, with a consistent situational open-ended approach to actor guidance, using completely unconscious child actors, focusing on a moral ambiguity, using The camera "recorded" a time when "heresy" was gently generated.
Since the opening of the film, the "father and son" duo and the little girl who ran away from home looked at each other across the hole, and the film set a tone - the gentle gaze of the camera. It keeps us close to all the family members, as if we were there to spend months with them. Whenever an outsider arrives, we always "hear the sound of the person before we see it", the camera always shoots from inside the room, and we "receive" the outsider together with the members. In the interior of the family life, the camera also creates this sense of presence by "simulating" the perspectives of each member. For example, when Shota was studying alone in the closet after eating, the camera was shot at a height close to the ground. What we saw and his The same is the lower body of adults. At the same time, Hirokazu Kore-eda slowed down the rhythm of the movie, and gave up the display of Japanese-style seasonal scenery in the past movies (such as the invisible fireworks), so that the passage of time is internalized in the emotions of the characters, so that we can share with the characters. time and space.
However, this generation of gentleness was not smooth sailing. From the moment when the family members were raped, the objective and gentle gaze of the camera began to give way, and the camera began to be indistinguishable between the subjective point of view and the objective presentation. The position of the film is between family members and the public. The swing between power institutions has brought us a dislocation of vision and perception. This long, gentle interruption has given us this sense of dislocation from the first moment. The footage of the arrest did not directly capture the pictures of the police officers. Our eyes as the audience acted as the eyes of the police officers. But the intimacy we had built up with our family members made us feel sympathetic and contradicted the stance of the police that was supposed to be serious and impartial.
The interrogation scene that follows is an staggered editing of both sides facing the camera. The camera, while objectively presenting one side, also becomes a channel for us to bring us into the subjective viewpoint of the other side. The first is the face-to-face footage of the police officers. As the audience, we act as the eyes of the person being interrogated (family member). Facing the police’s streamlined, indifferent, and unsympathetic interrogation method, a kind of disapproval of the public authority has arisen. Conflict and doubt. Next is the face-to-face footage of the interrogated (family members), and we acted as the eyes of the police. Just when we were against this kind of staring, the voice-overs of the police revealed the "black history" of the family members. ”, let us suddenly abandon this sense of resistance and sympathy for family members, and truly stand on the side of the interrogator psychologically, and then their respective defenses will pull us back to the middle ground. In the end, the climax of this dislocation was brought about by Ando Sakura's superb one-man show. Her response was similar to a "monologue", which made us forget about the interrogation. Getting rid of the eyes of the interrogator and returning to an objective scrutiny position, with the line of "what should it be called? What should it be called?" blurted out, we as the audience are also in this "non-realism" situation Have space to think. In the end, the scene returned to gentleness, and it fell to the double shot of the policeman and Shota played by Kengo Ko Liang. He gave Shota his police badge to play with, with an amiable attitude. The entire interrogation process did not deliberately smear the public authority, nor did it sympathize with beautifying the members of the family. As the audience, we constantly generated the perceptions of both parties, and brought reflections on social issues in this delicate perception process.
After the "disintegration" of the thief family, their lives continue, the relationship between j members is no longer the same, and the concern is not interrupted. The camera keeps a slight distance from them, as if to leave space for the characters: such a time of living together has taken root in their hearts, and the future is unknown and open to him.
Also in the book "Things I Was Thinking When Filming", it was Hirokazu Koreeda who talked about the previous work "Nobody Knows". He wrote: "I don't want to discuss who is right and who is wrong, or how adults should treat children, how the laws around children should be amended, etc. The so-called criticism, lessons and suggestions are not what I want to talk about. Movies are not The director who judges people is not a god or a judge. I always hope that when the audience returns to their daily life after watching the movie, their views on life will change. This may become an opportunity for them to observe the daily life with a critical perspective. ."
The same is true of "The Thief Family", the film screening is over, the characters are not "dead", they are still "alive" in our minds, we who have seen this film are more or less different, and parts of us are potentially affected by Released, we will "symbiotic" with these characters, and our future is also open. I think that's what the director made this movie for.
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